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The moon does
have its own pull, more poetic lore
than its iron core

and a gravity formed
from the debris of its astronomical
birth; more like

another mutant
on the block of hopeless metaphor.
We have been there before

because it is,
and within a shot as achievable
as that is too:

I mean,
phenomenal. So this terrestrial aim
is no more than name in

being unfeasible,
more like a photo op than an orbit
to attain, more Luna

than the tic
tock of a countdown that will fail;
poetry that rhymes

just for how it sounds.
There is no fury, and the basic bore
is just this.

A new magic,
the rhetoric of an argument
without foresight

but repeated
again and again and again and again
and again and again

as if enough –
magic like feeding with loaves and fish,
a diet of faith

where there is none.
Hands / hands / face / face / space / space:
if we double up

to double down.
It is all podium talk when they cannot
walk the walk, and

it is just a list.
Rules are there for the forsaking,
as are the dead.

The apple with blueberry farewell
The apple I ate for lunch
The apple that tastes like candy
The apple I left for wasps
The apple with blood from gums
The apple with inner snow
The apple that fell in wind
The apple with blood from sin
The apple that picked my hand
The apple with a core of good
The apple on teacher’s desk
The apple with the vestige of myth
The apple between blossom and bruise
The apple with poppycock and bushwa
The apple without bitter gall
The apple touched by disease
The apple for alcohol
The apple sprouting leaves
The apple inside its pie
The apple Ray called an apple
The apple with Sodom’s ash
The apple inside its roundness
The apple in a spray of death
The apples in Eve’s caress
The apple dressing pork
The apple with Adam’s choke
The apple without a tree
The apple in French glaze
The apple no student gave to me
My apple

http://www.theredceilingspress.co.uk/

I am delighted to announce this new chapbook which is available at The Red Ceilings. This is a return to the press and I am most pleased to be here again: thank you Mark.

Thank you to IT and Rupert for posting this. Read it here: http://internationaltimes.it/the-concept-of-a-chokehold/

Boris Johnson makes so many continuous mistakes – I’m being polite – that his subsequent attempts at revisionism (those re-framing euphemisms, for example, to try and lesson the original disastrous expressions/promises/assurances) are now legendary drivel. This one is simply inaccurate because we know the algorithm was designed to produce the inequalities and injustices it did! Also, the application of the algorithm was employed to prevent teacher assessment being used, this an ideological intervention that had nothing to do with awarding the most accurate assessments in complex times and everything to do with suppressing professional input.

There is only one
froth in froths unless riding
them in on waves

The deference of
obeisance when being obedient
to poetry’s curtsies

When snowdrops
close the slowest way
for night’s end

Antics huge or
small are still their
own escapades

To divide a third
from a second is a stanza
too far gone

Punctuation: not always,
like here, all about something
delivered

This morning’s
tempest has not been the
first, nor fast

[from an errata to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Poems on Various Subjects, with thanks to Adam Roberts at ‘Samuel Taylor Bloggeridge’]

With thanks to IT and Rupert. Read http://internationaltimes.it/cultural-accretion/.